CHAPTER 24 RAYA #3
Suck it up, Raya. I force myself to forget the weakness, forget the nausea, forget the pain, to focus only on the body dangling lifelessly from the gate, left for the pious to discover as they arrive to begin their early morning worship.
He’s been stripped of his shirt, draped in a ceremonial silver robe, with a deep hood covering his face and the sacred sun sigil branded across his sternum, shining bright above the message that’s been crudely carved into his stomach and echoed in blood on the ground beneath his legs.
You will all pay.
The bile in my throat is acid, the sickness entirely divorced from all the iron in the square.
It seems Adriel is finally ready to declare his war in earnest, which likely means that this latest test has been successful—and that it was the reason the future couldn’t answer my questions right away; it had to wait for him to prove the theory, to impose on a typic the full measure of a Shade.
Of this Shade. A chill joins the churn in my gut, my feet moving me closer step by agonizing step. Whoever he was, he deserves better than a sacrificial hanging. He deserves dignity, not a spectacle, to escape the scrutiny of this unholy place.
“Raya—don’t.” Akari’s arms clamp around my shoulders. “We have to go before the trackers arrive, understand? They can’t know we were here.”
Except they have to know, the future said so.
And they will know because I refuse to leave.
“Then go, Kiri,” I growl, breaking out of her grip. “But I’m not going anywhere until I see who that is.” Until I get to the bottom of this feeling that it’s my fault he ended up on the Meridian’s table, that I’m the reason he’s been bled dry of his color and hung up like a spit pig.
It’s his hands I recognize first, the long fingers and the quick-bitten nails, a habit he picked up in childhood when his father left and the weight of his mother’s expectations became his burden to bear.
No.
How many times did those hands wrap around my waist? How many times did I let them run through my hair, or dance across my ribs, or dip under my shirt and explore my body until we were both left gasping for breath?
No, it can’t be. With trembling fingers, I reach for the hood hiding his face. It can’t be him; it just can’t. There’s no way this can be—
Killen.
The scream that rips from me is a broken, feral thing. It’s disbelief, and it’s denial, and it’s a guilty conscience; it’s every frayed emotion the future predicted I’d feel, a pain so raw and primal it guts me worse than the iron.
No—I won’t let you be dead. I attack the ropes pinning Killen to the metal.
Not Killen’s body, Killen, because I won’t accept that he’s dead when I saw him only last night, at the park.
When he was alive last night, at the park, not cold to the touch and ghostly pale.
When him being there in the first place was entirely my fault.
He left the Academy to find me.
Then he left the tavern after I paid a girl to trick him into thinking he had.
And then to make matters worse, I didn’t stay. I talked myself out of staying and ensuring that once she’d left him to his own devices, he got back to the castle safe.
Gods, forget cruel, how could I have been so stupid?
How could I not have seen exactly where that choice would end?
“Raya, stop. He’s gone.” Even as I fight the knots keeping him captive, Akari’s fighting me, her efforts tinged with horror and her voice heavy with tears.
“There’s nothing we can do for him anymore.
He’s gone.” That word exudes finality, like hammering a nail into a coffin and burying it six foot deep.
“Now, please—we have to go.” She steals a glance at the crowd converging on the cathedral, the growing number of typics observing this macabre performance in lieu of their morning prayers.
When they whisper to their companions, it’s irritation I hear in their scandal, not outrage or grief.
They don’t care that a Shade is gone, they care that a Shade saw fit to exist, that even in death he’s sullying their church, somehow, disrupting their fragile peace.
Vultures, all of them. Not for the first time, I wish I’d been born with an active power, so that I could hurt them the way their hate has hurt me, use it to cut Killen down from view.
“I’m not leaving him like this, Akari—so either help me, or leave.
” I don’t mean to take my anger out on her, but there’s just so damn much of it, ready and eager to turn inward and rend me limb from limb.
Killen was right to call me a coward. He was right about my propensity for bad decisions, and he was right about me. He was right about everything.
“I can try.” Akari sends a labored flex of Orange at the ropes, though thanks to all the iron, it takes several more before they finally fray enough to give.
“Thank you,” I say as—breathing hard—she helps me ease him down from the gate, ignoring the way the square around us ripples with the arrival of more Shades.
“Ari—Raya—what the hells is going on? Is that a—oh Gods.” It’s Saleen’s shock I hear first, followed by Ezzo’s gasp and Cemmy’s revulsion, Chase’s distaste for the irate wave of jeers that tears through the crowd.
They’re not used to seeing us phase so brazenly around their house of worship, and they don’t much like to watch a group of us blink between worlds en masse. It makes them feel inferior.
“Get Akari out of here, Saleen! Get them all out of here!” I yell for her to spare them the capture the future has in store for me, to get them to safety while she still can.
But for the second time tonight, I’m too late, because with a faint pop and a rustle of air, we’re suddenly surrounded by trackers on every side.
“Go—now!” What happens next is a tangled mess of spells, curses, and charms. It’s surprised screams and growled obscenities, iron-damped magic and crystal-borne power. It’s clutching Killen in my arms until the dust settles to reveal that we’re not the only casualties of fate’s meddling.
Ezzo.
He’s on his knees across the square, lip split and nose bloodied, driven to surrender by a swell of magic and kept from running by two hulking Reds.
He doesn’t say anything as we’re phased away.
He doesn’t look at me.
He doesn’t protest.
Though his hand does brush mine for the briefest of seconds, as if to remind me that we’re still allied.
That’s when I understand the gift he’s buying me with his silence.
If Ezzo doesn’t acknowledge me, then I can claim that we’re not together.
I can claim that I was just at the wrong place at the wrong time, a spectator to the violence while he’s the cause, the evil Sapphire acting on the Divine Meridian’s
behalf. But no matter how hard I work to catch his eye and tell him that I won’t do it—that I won’t be responsible for the death of another Shade, however diluted their color—Ezzo only heeds me long enough to give an almost imperceptible sigh.
There’s no point in them killing us both, it seems to say, and it makes me want to slip my shackles and shake him until he understands that I did this, not him.
The future showed me my capture, not his, and he shouldn’t have to pay for my willingness to follow that instruction blind, without taking a single second to think.
Except that truth won’t save him.
He’s an illegal Hue who’ll be executed regardless; the only question now is whether I’ll also be standing trial.
Was this your plan, huh? I ask the future. Is this what you wanted? For both of us to end up in cuffs?
But of course, the future can’t answer that question, and even if it did, I imagine it would simply confirm what I already know in my heart: that the only thing it wants is its own survival—and that I truly am a coward down to the last. Because when the trackers lead us off in opposite directions, I don’t make a single plea for them to spare Ezzo’s life.